open letter

An Open Letter to Tinder’s Sean Rad from V.F.’s Nancy Jo Sales

Congratulations. I hear that Match Group, the company that owns Tinder, the dating app you co-founded in 2012, successfully went public yesterday. That’s great for you. I guess that means you’re a whole lot better off financially than you already were, having co-founded such a successful app—and one which, according to a piece earlier this week in the London Evening Standard, “analysts say” has 80 million users worldwide. Wow—that’s a lot.

But wait. That 80 million figure isn’t exactly accurate. At least not according to Match Group, which had to do a quickie S.E.C. filing the day before it went public, in order to distance itself from that number. Tinder actually had 9.6 million users in September 2015, according to the preliminary prospectus for the company, filed with the S.E.C. on November 17. Match Group made clear in its filing that “these statements were not made by Mr. Rad.” But who are these silly “analysts”? According to a 2014 piece in The New York Times, “Tinder wouldn’t share the exact number of people on the service” but “a person with knowledge of the situation” said “that it is fast approaching 50 million active users.”

I know this person couldn’t have been you because you would never say anything inaccurate or do anything inappropriate. It was your Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen who was accused of sexual harassment in 2014—not you. (Although I know it must have been annoying for Tinder to have to settle the sexual-harassment lawsuit filed by Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe for, reportedly, more than a million dollars.) According to what you said in the Evening Standard piece from earlier this week, you don’t even send dick pics. And I know a lot of women are grateful for that. Your gentlemanliness must be why you have a “supermodel” “begging” to have sex with you: “And I’ve been like, no,” you told the Evening Standard. I bet she’s upset.

You say you’ve actually “been attracted to women who are . . . well who my friends might think are ugly.” See, it’s an appealing attitude like that that gets a guy like you treated like a rock star, like at a recent Web summit in Dublin, where you say you were greeted by “screaming” fans. Being such a big celebrity and all, it’s not surprising that you don’t have time to find out the meaning of certain vocabulary words. “Apparently there’s a term for someone who gets turned on by intellectual stuff,’” you said in the Evening Standard. “You know, just talking. What’s the word? . . . I want to say ‘sodomy’?”

But wait another second. As I kept reading this incredible interview, I saw my name, and I was like . . . huh? It said: “Rad is ‘defensive’ and still ‘upset’ about the article”—in Vanity Fair it was called “Tinder Is the Night”—“muttering mysteriously that he has done his own ‘background research’ on the writer Nancy Jo Sales, ‘and there’s some stuff about her as an individual that will make you think differently.’ He won’t elaborate on the matter.”

Sean, don’t be mysterious, please elaborate. Were you talking about my career as a journalist over the past 20 years, 15 of them at Vanity Fair, one of the top publications in the world? I don’t think you were. On CNBC’s Squawk Box yesterday, host Rebecca Quick pressed Match Group chairman Greg Blatt on your apparent suggestion that you “had some inside information that would not reflect kindly on that author,” meaning me. Backpedalling from your strange claim of having done “background research” on me, Blatt said that what you actually meant was that you “had Googled actual articles that the person,” meaning I, “had written before, and he thought there were some interesting things in those articles.” Well, thanks so much. I’m glad that you find my work interesting.

But, Sean, you and I both know that when you spoke of me as “an individual,” you were talking about me personally. And you seemed to speak from a place of emotion, admitting that you were “upset” about my piece in Vanity Fair—which wasn’t actually just about Tinder per se, but changes in the world of dating, with the introduction of dating apps overall. This was something I tried to point out in my response to an avalanche of tweets directed at me, one night in August, when someone at Tinder decided that he or she would try to besmirch my reputation as a journalist as well. Your Twitter account admonished me: “Next time reach out to us first . . . that’s what journalists typically do.”

I don’t know what you and your colleagues at Tinder think journalism is, but I don’t believe it’s the same as what most journalists think it is. Our job is to report on what real people say and do, and how this impacts our world. It’s not our job to parrot what companies would like us to know about their products. Our job is an important one, and when the heads of companies decide to go after journalists personally, then I think we’re in very dangerous territory—not only for journalists, but for the whole practice of journalism, without which we can’t have a democracy.

I don’t need to point out that these kinds of personal attacks seem to happen to female journalists more than male ones. Some people in the media and on social media have even suggested you were “threatening” me with what you said. Were you doing that, Sean? “There is a pattern with male tech execs in how they react when female journalists criticize them,” tweeted Elizabeth Ford, a software engineer. I don’t know if such a pattern exists in tech alone; I do know that after Sarah Lacy, the editor of Pando, reported on what she called “the outrageous sexism woven deeply into the culture” of the car-service company Uber, BuzzFeed writer Ben Smith then wrote about a dinner at which Uber senior vice president Emil Michael spoke of his plans to discredit her. Michael “outlined the notion of spending ‘a million dollars’ to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists,” Smith wrote. “That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press—they’d look into ‘your personal lives, your families,’ and give the media a taste of its own medicine. . . . Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy . . . Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.” Michael later e-mailed Lacy apologizing for his comments, saying he was “venting.”

Attacks like this on journalists are more frequently seen in countries that don’t enjoy the sort of liberties we have in our great democracy, Sean. And in the Evening Standard interview, you said that, at Tinder, “We believe in democracy.” So how does your personal attack on a journalist (me) square with this notion?

I’d be happy for you to join me in a public forum to talk about the important issues surrounding this little kerfuffle between you and me—freedom of the press; female journalists and freedom of the press. I invite the head of Match Group to come along, and anyone else at your company who has something relevant to say. I think people are concerned about the pressure that companies seem to feel they can put on journalists as a way of managing their bottom lines. I know that we could sit down and, together, really hash this out.